Mat Clark – IELTS Speaking
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language. (Regardless of what these languages are.)
This causes problems because as we have just seen, to get a higher score for speaking
it is essential to produce ―native speaker style English‖, but in fact most candidates produce
Chinese style spoken English. In other words, they speak English in a similar way to how
they speak Chinese.
It is not easy to instantly change your style of speaking, but one important step is to
first consider the style of your first language and compare this with the style of the second
language. Basically, to be able to speak English in
the style of a native speaker, it is
necessary to compare spoken Chinese with spoken English.
When you can recognize the differences between these two speaking systems, it will
be much easier to work on removing elements of your first language
influence from your
second language speech.
Building a clear picture of how these two spoken languages differ makes it easier to
produce a more ―authentic style‖ of English.
Think about the way you speak your first language (most likely Chinese).
Try to list some points based on the style that native-speakers actually speak your
language.
Remember, we are not thinking about the
actual language system here; we are
dealing with the way that language is commonly used its spoken form.
The next section deals with this important step.
Mat Clark – IELTS Speaking
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